Steinem, Unhinged

Why am I glad to be out of college? Because I don’t have to deal with nitwit feminists anymore.

So what exactly is a “chick flick?” I think you and I could probably agree that it has more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die.

Also, the men are emasculated twerps. But I would argue that non chick-flicks would also include films like Twelve Angry Men, Citizen Kane, It’s A Wonderful Life, Amelie and To Kill a Mockingbird, which involve little violence, no special effects and only off-screen death.

It might also include movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, Mockingbird, Silence of the Lambs, Spirited Away and Leon in which the heroine is, in fact, female.

Indeed, the books you read probably only survived because they were written by famous guys.

Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll’s House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal?

Ah, the feminist ignorance of history — of the times when, if a woman wanted to have three kids live to adulthood, she needed to get pregnant a dozen times and deliver 5-10 kids. A time when there was no birth control and people lived to be 45. When there weren’t diaper genies and vacuum cleaners that made raising a family anything less than a full-time job and then some. And when working to have enough to eat occupied the entire lifetime of men. When literacy was something only the rich had time for. The reason we remember male writers is because, for a long time, male writers were almost all we had.

But Ms. Steinem is right. Certainly no one has ever heard of Jane Austen. Or Emily Dickinson. Or Mary Shelley (hardly “chick lit”). Or Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Or Agatha Christie. Or Margery Kempe (OK, that one’s obscure). Or Harper Lee. Or Margaret Mitchell. Or Ayn Rand (Steinem would probably not consider her a woman). Or Virginia Woolf. Or George Eliot.

Indeed, as long men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women aren’t taken seriously when writing about themselves much less about men or male affairs — the list of Great Authors will be more about power than about talent.

Yes, powerful people. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe.

She goes into a long diatribe about how “male” movies glorify war and conflict — which is true. Of course, war and conflict defined the human race up until relatively recently. And violence still defines the non-human world. And there is ample evidence that civilization has arisen not because we have eliminted our violent tendencies, but brought them under better control.

I strongly believe that movie violence, TV violence, video game violence, even “boys running around playing guns” violence is a way of satisfying our violent animal urges without actually doing any harm. That’s a good thing. Or at least, it beats the hell out of the way men used to satisfy their violent urges — wars, public executions, animal torture and lynchings.

All the movies that portray violence against women, preferably beautiful, sexy, half-naked women. These feature chainsaws and house parties for teenage guys, serial killers and sadistic rapists for ordinary male adults, plus cleverly plotted humiliations and deaths of powerful women for the well-educated misogynist.

You know, I looked through IMDB’s top movies. Are there are lot of top-rated movies involving the carefully planned humiliation and death of powerful women? There are serial killers, yes. None that are glorified. And one of the top-rated serial killer movies has the beat taken out by a woman.

But carefully planned humilation and death? Someone point out a movie I’ve missed.

And on what continent is “Boxing Helena” the ultimate guy movie? An obscure 1993 art film written and directed by a woman that is rated as one of the worst movies ever (3.8 on IMDB) and is rated higher by women than men (link).

When you have to stretch so far to find a misogynistic movie, I think you’ve made my point for me.

The thing is, critics hammer stupid horror and action movies too. And a lot of women like stupid horror movies and serial killer flicks. Hell, one of my best women friends hates chick flicks and loves Indiana Jones. And the top-rated movies at IMDB are almost identical for men and women. I guess this tells the radical feminists that we’ve got a lot of deluded women out there.

But you have to follow the Leftist logic. Any movie that doesn’t involve teary-eyed women hugging must be violent and misogynist.

And this is the thing that drives me crazy about the Academic Left. That they impute objective truth to their subjective opinions. So if you don’t like the same movies Gloria Steinem does, it’s not because you have different tastes. It’s because you’re a violent misogynist who hates women, even if you are a woman. Actually, especially if you are a woman.

Of course, the real misogynist societies in our world — places like Iran and Taliban Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia — don’t like movies with “beautiful, sexy, half-naked women” either. But that’s facts for you.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under 'Culture'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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